Dashboards and Data Visualization with Xamarin and ShinobiControls

Written by Sam Davies

Good data visualization is especially important in mobile apps, due to the smaller form-factor, and dashboards are specifically designed to show off data at a glance. Colin and I presented a webinar for Xamarin which delves into the principles of data visualization – including demonstrating how to improve any existing data visualizations you may have.

We also run through the dashboard app we’ve built, which visualizes a variety of data about GitHub repos, available through their RESTful API using interactive charts, grids and other UI components.

The app is built using Xamarin and ShinobiControls, which are easily importable using the Xamarin component store. We first look at how simple it is to use a ShinobiChart in a Xamarin.iOS app, before delving deep into the code of the dashboard app.

You can view the recording of the webinar here:

ShinobiControls have 3 products in the Xamarin Component Store. You can find out more about them here:

They’re all available to try and/or buy directly from Xamarin Studio – checkout the video to see how easy this is to do!

The dashboard app also made use of the recently unveiled ShinobiGauges, an exciting new control we’re offering as part of ShinobiLabs. It is already fully Xamarin compliant, so you can head over to the labs page and download a copy.

The code for the dashboard app is available on the ShinobiControls GitHub repo – github.com/ShinobiControls/GithubDashboard-Xamarin There are instructions in the readme which explain how to get started – feel free to fork it and send us pull requests with any ideas and improvements!

Thank you to all those who watched the webinar live – we hope you enjoyed it. Let us know if you found it interesting/useful – we might run further webinars in future.